The Golem of Hollywood

Chapter eight

It was late by the time Jacob finished canvassing the neighborhoods below Castle Court.

He started at the bottom of the hill and worked his way up. The type of folks who elected to live thirty-plus minutes from the nearest supermarket were also the type of folks who didn’t take kindly to nighttime visits. Those who answered were reluctant to open the door, and those who did hadn’t seen anything. By general consensus, the murder house was an eyesore, abandoned as long as anyone could remember.

Number 332, the final stop before the road went to dirt, hid behind a high stucco wall bristling with pigeon spikes and brooding CCTV cameras.

Jacob craned through his car window, cajoling the homeowner over the intercom. For ten minutes he sat staring at the gate, a forbidding sheet of rust-finished steel, while she phoned the department to verify his badge number.

A motor ground; the gate shunted aside on recessed tracks. Lowering his brights, he wound up a crushed-stone driveway through tussocks and cacti toward yet another mid-century modern, well maintained, an asymmetric white cuboid forced into the terrain.

She was waiting by the front door in an emerald flannel bathrobe, a woman in her mid-fifties with scowl lines that broadcast across ten feet of darkness. He prepared to be told off.

Instead she introduced herself as Claire Mason, pressed a half-gallon mug of bitter tea on him, and escorted him through a tight, short entry hall into a living room with a buffed concrete floor and forward-sloping windows, like the prow of a spaceship as it plowed over an urban lightscape. Abstract Expressionist art crazed the walls. The furniture had been designed for skinny people with no children.

She batted away his questions with her own: Was she in danger? Should she be on the lookout for anything in particular? Should she call a neighborhood watch meeting? She was the president. She had moved out here to get away from all that.

He said, “Do you happen to know anything about the house up the road? Number 446?”

“What about it?”

“Who lives there?”

“Nobody.”

“Do you know who owns it?”

“Why?”

“This is really interesting,” he said of the tea, which tasted like it had been brewed from guano. “What is it?”

“Stinging nettle,” she said. “It prevents bladder infections. I own a gun. I don’t keep it loaded, but listening to you I’m thinking I might have to start.”

“I really don’t think that’ll be necessary.”

Eventually he quelled her agitation and steered the conversation around to the security cameras. Through the kitchen — onyx, more cement — to a converted pantry, replete with canned goods and alarm panels and a shortwave radio. A bank of monitors cycled through various exterior angles. The chair cushion showed the two-humped indentation of long, fond hours kept.

“Very impressive,” he said.

“I can access it on my phone and iPad, too,” she said, settling in.

In her needy preening, he recognized the paradox at the heart of any paranoiac: the validation that persecution provided.

“How long before the footage deletes?” he asked.

“Forty-eight hours.”

“Can you give me the road, yesterday, about five p.m. on?”

She brought up a window broken into eight panes, each showing a virtually identical blank strip. She clicked the counter, entered the time, set the playback to 8×, and hit the space bar.

Except for a change from full color to night-vision green, the windows remained static.

It was like the worst art film ever made.

“Can you speed it up a hair?” he asked.

She increased to 16×.

A shape zapped across the screen.

“What was that?” he asked.

“Coyote.”

“Are you sure? Can you go back?”

She rolled her eyes, rewound, set playback to 1×.

Sure enough: a shaggy, scrawny animal, slinking along with its tongue out.

“I’m amazed you could tell,” he said.

Claire Mason smiled dreamily at the screen. “Practice, practice, practice.”

Up at the murder house, he sat in the Honda, listening to the tick and clank of the overworked engine as it cooled. Every visit was taking years off its life. Between the Discover card and the advance on his salary, he supposed he could spring for a rental.

Anyone coming here by car would have to pass Claire Mason’s cameras. But he hadn’t seen tire tracks anywhere on the property, no crushed vegetation.

On foot? Hiking in, circumventing the road, head in a sagging Trader Joe’s bag?

A helicopter?

Jetpack?

Magic carpet?

Alakazam!

Oddly, the house looked less bleak than it had during the day, its menace effaced by a wide field of stars. Wind carried the snicks and clicks and hoots of animal life, abundant and invisible, creatures that come out at night.

He took his flashlight from the glove box, but didn’t need it to find his way to the front door. He didn’t need it inside, either. Moonlight mixed with city glow flooded the open air.

It felt significant to him that the place was both totally isolated and totally exposed.

You’d expect a body dump to be chosen with secrecy in mind. The staging reeked of exhibitionism, though, and those two facts in combination hinted at a desire for a specific audience.

Who owned this place?

Who knew about it?

He checked the sat phone for a missed call from Hammett. Frowned. No reception. These things were supposed to work anywhere.

He walked around, waving the phone, one bar dancing in and out. He managed to pin it down outside the master. He waited for a message icon to appear, but there was nothing.

The air was surprisingly free of death funk, and on the whole, he noticed that he felt less creeped out than he would have thought. Jacob was no mystic, but he did believe that people were drawn toward spaces that reflected their personalities, and that the soul of a residence and the soul inhabiting it grew progressively overlapped over time.

Here, he sensed a kind of serenity, verging on Zen calm. It would be a good place to write, or draw, or sculpt — an atelier in the sky, ideal for the rare artist who could afford it.

Or someone with money, posturing as an artist.

In Jacob’s experience, the vast majority of bad guys took the path of least resistance. That was what made them bad guys: an overwhelming need to do whatever they wanted while expending as little energy as possible. Most criminality was a pathological form of laziness.

This guy, though. He had a sense of style. Repulsive, but distinct. Maybe he truly was different, or thought he was. There was a second variety of criminal, less common but flashier. The Rippers, the Ed Geins, the BTKs. They went the extra mile to make the papers. A notable subtype being the Hitlers and the Stalins and the Pol Pots.

Both types were dangerous. The first because they were careless, the second because they were careful.

Jacob wandered into the studio and stood before the east-facing window, thinking about the house he’d grown up in, the corner of the garage taken over by twenty-five-pound boxes of clay, jars of paint and glaze, a small electric kiln, a drying rack hidden behind a drop cloth. The wonky three-legged stool she sat on. No potter’s wheel. Bina Lev had worked freehand.

He had a vague notion of a youthful flirtation with the avant-garde. No physical evidence of that period remained, though, and by the time he got old enough to conceive of his mother as an individual with ambitions, hers had imploded. The woman he knew strictly produced ritual objects — goblets for holding the Sabbath wine, menorahs, spice boxes for the havdalah ceremony. She hauled them to weekend fairs, sold them on consignment at local Judaica stores. You couldn’t exactly call it pragmatic, her choice to forsake art for craft. It wasn’t like she made any money. And there was bitter irony for Jacob in learning that these items were now considered collectible in some circles, owing to their scarcity.

The Internet would have served her well. Poor timing.

Poor timing, all around.

Shortly after her funeral, Sam, nearly comatose with grief, decided to put the house up for sale. It was a simple enough matter getting rid of the furniture, but he begged off cleaning out the garage. Jacob stepped in. He was used to feeling like the sole adult.

He bought a roll of contractor bags and went about the business with methodical rage, half-finished candelabra thrown in indiscriminately alongside unopened cases of Amaco Low Fire Lead-Free. He disjointed the drying rack and gave the pieces to his neighbor, who had a working fireplace. A pawnbroker offered him thirty dollars for the kiln, a sum so meager that it brought remorse down on him like a bootheel.

Fifty with the tools.

Jacob said no, thanks, he’d decided to keep those.

He took his thirty bucks and went back to the garage, combing through the bags in search of anything worth salvaging. He’d done an unfortunately thorough job of venting his anger: mostly it was shards and dust.

A few items swathed in newspaper had survived. A couple of coffee mugs. A double-handled cup for washing hands. A mezuzah. A lidded jar with strong, thin walls whose exact function he could not determine. He placed them carefully in a duffel bag lined with towels.

One well-padded bundle turned out to be several dozen smaller pieces, individually wrapped. Curious, he pulled away a corner of the paper and was startled by the appearance of a tiny, alien face. He unwrapped the rest of the pieces and discovered more of the same.

He had long assumed that his mother’s switch to plates and cups had something to do with Judaism’s disapproval of depictions of the human form — an outgrowth of the ban on idolatry.

Or maybe she had given herself an out, on a technicality: certainly, the things in his hands weren’t human in any conventional sense. Gray, mottled with black and dark green, strongly organic, they shimmered, and their limbs writhed as though to escape.

Bina had invited people to handle her creations. Even the simplest pieces responded to touch.

These appeared to resent it.

Surrounded by junk on the floor of the broiling garage, his hair sticking up, he’d stared at the figurines, wondering if and how he’d misjudged her.

He wrapped them up and put them in the duffel.

He’d borne this sad legacy through two marriages and countless apartments, nailing up the mezuzah, putting the washing cup by the kitchen sink, filling the jar with sugar. He took his coffee black, but it gave him something pleasant to offer a lady friend in the morning. They oohed and aahed at his good taste.

The potter’s tools he displayed in the bookcase: they were objects of beauty in themselves, their smooth wooden handles glowing from within. He could look at them and be reminded that life was fragile and strange and brief. For some reason, that made him feel good.

The figurines creeped Renee out so badly that he’d moved them to a safe deposit box.

Probably not worth the monthly rental. Anyway, nobody around to protest now, and as he peered down into the pleated canyon, he thought that he ought to go retrieve them.

A black hand smacked the glass.

He crashed backward, Glock up, shouting orders at an empty room.

Silence.

The thing that had made the noise — it was outside, clinging to the window.

Squat, domelike. Black segmented underbelly. Flittering wings tonguing the glass.

He shook his head and laughed at himself. He’d almost put two bullets in a bug. Twenty hours without sleep or proper nutrition could do that to you.

He holstered his gun, left the house, and jogged to the Honda. He reached down and grasped one of the liquor bottles. He took a few sips, leaving himself just shy of impairment, just enough control to get home, drink more, and fall asleep.

That night, he dreamt of an endless garden, lush and dripping. At its crowning center stood Mai. She was naked, her arms open to him. He stretched for her but he could not reach her, and the chasm between them ached, for he understood that on the other side lay a homecoming.